[ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design (was Re: Rejecting Socrates)

[spike]

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On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> If Einstein had never been born, would we have General Relativity now?
 Of course we would.
>> It would be associated with someone else's name, that's all.

>Agreed. What Einstein did was discover a basic scientific law... -Kelly


General relativity is sometimes offered as a counter example to the concept
suggested.  Had Einstein never been born, we would surely have had special
relativity.  Others were working on that at the time or were close to it.
But it isn't entirely clear that we would have general relativity.  I think
we probably would have found it eventually by now, but that one is so free
of immediate applications I wouldn't bet on it.  

There are plenty of mathematical discoveries which would likely have never
yet been discovered, were it not for the giants who have gone before, such
as the weird and wacky stuff discovered by Srinivasa Ramanujan for instance.
It stands to reason there should be one or two like that in the physics
world. 

spike